As many of you probably have wondered where the hell are the "Aliens", I also wen't down the Fermi Paradox path.

I think it is fairly reasonable to think that Earth is not exceptional and the life that appeared and evolved on our planet isn't the first one, or the only one out there.

Assuming that faster than light travel is insanely inpractical if not impossible to achieve, I concluded that the technology required to traverse the vast distances between stars and colonise the galaxy is biotechnology/nanotechnology. You need to be able to last long, you also need self healing capabilities, and the ability to utilise resources of a wide variety depending on how hostile or hospitable the destination is. Being able to manipulate matter and living systems on the scale of molecules seems to be the technology that enables hundreds of thousands of years long journeys between stars, and the rapid growth and deployment of copies of your craft to spread among the stars.

This technology has some other consequences though. One is that once mastered, your inherited evolved biology becomes absolete.

I thought that once such a system reaches an already inhabited system one of the possible actions is to integrate oneself into the already present system. If a planet has a living biosphere, it would be easier to merge with it, then to wipe it out and start over again.

So to me it seems that a long term survival strategy could be to "hijack" a small portion of the computing power of a whole biosphere to run your own mind and whatever other software you want. /virtual worlds etc./

In case of our own bioshpere, all you would need is a system where cells /like prokaryotes/ store a small amount of data and carry out a few operations per second. /compared to the normal operation of a cell/ The insane scale of only the prokaryotic part of the biosphere means that such a networked system could be unimaginably powerful and robust. /Estimates of the number of procaryotic cells on our planet is on the scale of 10^30th power. Imagine a computer that only does 1 operation/second/cell, on 1 byte/cell.../

If your "architecture" is spread over the whole planet including all habitats and thus over millions or possibly billions of different strains of bacteria, then you are protected from a wide range of catastrophies.

If you look at our current advances in attempting to utilise living systems for computation, this doesn't sound like a far fetched idea at all. /at least not to me/

The funny bit is that if you look into the biology of procaryotes there is a lot of networked communication happening. There are viruses doing horizontal gene transfer between species. Take plasmids for instance, they are utilised to transfer antibiotic resistances between cells /among other things/. Bacteria also can form various kinds of tubes to connect cells. /plasmid transfer is just one reason/ Possibly there is a whole heap of signaling based on molecules as messengers.

The even funnier bit is that their biology doesn't seem to stop there. There are species that can detect and align themselves with magnetic fields, which hints at the possibility of wireless communication.

This specific article /the actual scientific paper/ did the math to see if DNA could behave as an antenna and what frequency it would be radiating at. It refers to another article where they have observed some EM radiation of a few KHz in test colonies. Their math seem to confirm what was observed.

Now imagine this network also extended over multicellular organisms like fungi, plants, animals...

So what if a small portion of the computing power of all the cells on the planet is dedicated to do operations that has nothing to do with it's pure biological function of survival and reproduction? What if this portion is dedicated to run a mind or a group of minds? Heck it could run whole virtual realities!

I thought if this was the case, surely us intelligent and self aware beings would have noticed something. Especially if these minds pay attention and also interact or observe what's happening to "their computer".

Then all the mythologies and various religions popped into my head. This could actually explain a whole heap of our supposedly made up religious heritage without invoking anything supernatural, but also without ignoring all the extraordinary claims by attributing it to nonsense hogwash people just made/make up all the time.

I tried google to see if anyone out there has come to a similar conclusion, but couldn't find anything.

Although Douglas Adams has toyed with the idea of life on Earth as a giant computer, and there are other stories of planet sized minds, or intelligent bacteria. The idea isn't original, but it seems none has actualy taken the thought seriously enough to actually investigate eventhough it is actually physically plausible.

I was just wondering what you guys think. Should this be further investigated? Or is it just too far out there?

Also in terms of computer science, how complex do you think the system would need to be? Could it be hidden enough to not be blatantly obvious the first time one opens up a cell and looks at it's inner workings? /Should biologists have already discovered this if it was real?/

Last but not least, could this be the solution to the Fermi Paradox? The pinaccle of technology is the merging with a biosphere and becoming "technologically" invisible for the rest of the galaxy. I mean we are looking for spaceships/spacecolonies/dison spheres/ radio signals/laser communication networks/planets covered in cities but this organism/organisms wouldn't need any of that for it's extremely long term survival. They could happily do whatever they want in their virtual realms for billions of years.

I think IIRC Greg Bears novel Blood Music was along similar lines but stating with nanotech on this planet.

It is not I think an idea totally beyond the realms of possibility if all that supposedly junk DNA is actually cloud quantum computer data centre for uploaded virtual Little Green Men(LGM). David Brin @DavidBrin on twitter collects possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox if you want to try him to see if its one of the ones he already has listed.

I doubt its the answer as to me most possible solutions don't take into account the bell curve as in that it is statistically more likely we should be on the the fat bit of the bell curve with various civilisations both less advanced and more advanced than us also distributed on that same bell curve so there should be some detectable by us even if really advanced ones are not detectable for some reason. It could be technological civilisations do kill themselves off one way or the another before they reach stellar travelling capabilities or even just being able to build a Dyson sphere(which we should be able to spot with the scopes we have these days)

The simplest solution to the Fermi “paradox” is that relativistic limitations really do make interstellar migration nearly impossible and that persistent intelligent technological species really are exceedingly rare, even if life is not. Many people seem to have the preconception that the evolution of life on a planet leads inevitably to a technological species, but there is no evidence to support this idea and plenty of evidence to contradict it.

Dinosaurs reigned on Earth for more than 180 million years, three times as long as mammals, in an evolutionary environment every bit as diverse and demanding as our own. Among zoologists, intelligence is regarded as just an other evolutionary adaptation such as sharp teeth or bright plumage, yet we have found no evidence whatsoever that an intelligent technological species of dinosaur ever arose.

An asteroid brought an end to any chance that the dinosaurs would finally get their act together and start building pyramids or interstellar arks. Much the same could happen to us or any other up and coming technological species out there. Thinkers, dreamers, planners and builders such as ourselves might be very few indeed and very far between.

Life (as we know it) may even be exceedingly rare if there is a narrow range of conditions and environmental stability (which practically eliminates all multiple star systems) in which water/carbon based life can come together and evolve beyond the goo stage. Earth might actually be more precious than we realize.

As for the biosphere being a massed network of molecular computers, I doubt it. There is no evidence to support it, even at time scales we can't perceive. Plus individual life and evolution is competitive in nature, even among the same species. That does not bode for there being some sort of cellular interconnection. There may be some molecular and even sub-atomic effects that are critical to biochemistry that we don't appreciate yet, but its pretty far fetched to spin elaborate theories around that possibility.

The human mind has a habit of seeing patterns and attempting to use analogies to explain things with. Sometimes a blob of chemicals is just a blob of chemicals and electronics people should stick to their computers.

Life (as we know it) may even be exceedingly rare if there is a narrow range of conditions and environmental stability (which practically eliminates all multiple star systems) in which water/carbon based life can come together and evolve beyond the goo stage. Earth might actually be more precious than we realize.

As for the biosphere being a massed network of molecular computers, I doubt it. There is no evidence to support it, even at time scales we can't perceive. Plus individual life and evolution is competitive in nature, even among the same species. That does not bode for there being some sort of cellular interconnection. There may be some molecular and even sub-atomic effects that are critical to biochemistry that we don't appreciate yet, but its pretty far fetched to spin elaborate theories around that possibility.

The human mind has a habit of seeing patterns and attempting to use analogies to explain things with. Sometimes a blob of chemicals is just a blob of chemicals and electronics people should stick to their computers.

As far as I know no one has even looked for evidence. It is however within the realms of science to do so.

I thought it is an interesting idea because it offers a naturalistic explanation for certain extraordinary claims of various religious groups.

Robert O. Becker, M.D., postulated in “The Body Electric” that a primordial electronic analog sensory ability predates the present ionic (“digital”) nervous systems of virtually all multi-cellular animals. He went on to suggest that evolution never discarded the analog systems, but rather built the “digital” systems using the analog networks as the scaffolding. Even though nervous systems conveying information with ionic impulses have come to dominate sensory ability and motor control, Becker suspected that the ancient underlying analog networks are still there and still functioning in seemingly mysterious ways.

Dr. Becker’s opinions are not to be taken lightly. He was always careful to distinguish between established fact and speculation and backed up all of his claims with simple repeatable experiments routinely published in respected peer-reviewed scientific journals, none of which has ever been refuted. Later in his long career, Becker drifted into studying silver ion treatments for disease, which I find less credible, but his earlier work stands on its own.

Steady-state non-neurological direct-current electrical potentials are easily measured throughout the skin using ordinary multi-meters fitted with specialized wet-contact probes. Proteins have been proven to be semiconducting. Bone, when exposed to infrared light, is photovoltaic! The distribution of electrical gradients in the body even seems to function as a kind of “Somatic Positioning System” analogous to GPS, informing individual cells and even invasive microbes exactly where they are in the body. The anatomically precise bilateral symmetry of certain infectious diseases is evidence of this.

I do not believe for a moment that life on Earth has been hijacked by alien programming or has evolved into some kind of Pandora-like world-mind, but the hypothesis that intercellular communication might have a non-ionic electromagnetic or electronic dimension essential to biological function is worthy of serious investigation.

To be exact if the "insertion" happened long ago, maybe during the epoch when multicellular life was just emerging, it should be considered to be an integrated part of life now and shouldnt be considered alien.

I think the system would have to be tied to the activity of proteins that are essential for the reproductive success of the carrying organism. This way evolution would conserve the machinery.

For information storage and processing I imagined a complex network of activation and signaling waves traveling in 3D in the living matrix of the biosphere. So a cell could have various states and it would depend on the signal wether it switches state or wether itself broadcasts a signal and what signal that is. The information storage and operations would be in the movement and interaction of these wavefronts.

I imagine something analogous to the interactions of depolarization waves on neural networks, except the networks in this case are virtual and depend on the 3D distribution of the states the cells are in, and the interaction of the waves would probably follow different algorithms.

But since I am no information science / biology expert this all is just jibberish.

I don't know if a system like this could be built, also how complex the machinery in each cell would need to be.

I think if it exists it would be a relatively simple and robust system, and the reason we haven't noticed it's operation is because it's always in sight and it's part of the operation of a system that serves other more obvious functions. It needs to be simple so it can be easily integrated and conserved over geological timescales.

Just read a couple of weeks ago about ferroelectricity in biological tissues. So the combination of the possibilty that dna can behave as an antenna, and proteins being able to change their electric charge in response to electric fields both seem indicate to me that such an architecture is feasible./well at least within the limits of my naive rudimentary understanding of biology and computers/

So the computer runs on a 3d matrix of switch+antenna pairs. The switch has a few states it can change between and these states determine the patterns of how the signal waves propagate in the matrix, but the signals also change the states of the switches thus can change the pattern of future waves.

It might not be clear, my response was mostly to James. Evolution can and does conserve structures if deviation leads to less optimal reproductive success, that is why I think this system would be part of the operation of very important and highly conserved protein complexes like the dna dependent rna polymerase. /although that might be a bad example, i should check if it is actually conserved between various taxa/

I do get the pessimism regarding the frequency of the appearance of intelligent technology utilising life. I do agree the likelyhood that this thing is here is slim.

However the more I think about this idea the more elegant solution it seems to be to the long term survival of intelligent life or minds. I mean this computer in "theory" could operate as long as a biosphere can. And it seems the lifespan of these entities /based on our own planet/ is in the range of billions of years.

Of course without evidence this is just a fun idea. I shared cause I am enjoying playing with it.

USJay I was merely "science fictionising" /bad english/ the development of technology. I think such a system could "evolve" through the intermediary step of an intelligent civilisation. However whether it happened or will happen I don't know. In sci-fi, minds uploading into bigger/better computers happen all the time, I merely am playing with the idea that the biggest computer I know /apart from the universe/ is calculating more than just life as we experience it.

Well technically this "theory" also aims to explain experiences like out of body experiences, minds without bodies /ghosts, demons, spirits/, ESP, prophets of the past, some miracles, various versions of afterlifes and how they could coexist, god or gods with various and sometimes contradicting personality traits and behavior...the lot really.

I am an atheist, I just enjoy thinking about how God could or would exist if it was real. A supercomputer embedded in the biosphere is an interesting solution IMO

You seem to be attempting to explain the world according to your self-professed atheism rather than encountering the world as it is. At the risk of sounding closed-minded, this is the exactly the same cart-before-the-horse pseudoscientific method creationists harness to reinforce their own deeply held beliefs. Ed Abbey, the outspoken environmentalist author and “monkeywrencher” (or eco-terrorist, depending on who is talking), once went so far as to describe activist atheists as “just fundamentalists of a different stripe.” For the sake of scientific objectivity, I hope you are not surrendering to that standard. The true scientist follows the evidence.

“Science-fictionising” (if I may borrow that coin) has inspired many real scientific and technological achievements, so I certainly encourage you not to break the habit! My concern is when writers and thinkers fail to respect the distinction between the science and the fiction. Also, my sources tell me the answer to that eagerly anticipated planetary biocalculation is 42.

You seem to be attempting to explain the world according to your self-professed atheism rather than encountering the world as it is. At the risk of sounding closed-minded, this is the exactly the same cart-before-the-horse pseudoscientific method creationists harness to reinforce their own deeply held beliefs. Ed Abbey, the outspoken environmentalist author and “monkeywrencher” (or eco-terrorist, depending on who is talking), once went so far as to describe activist atheists as “just fundamentalists of a different stripe.” For the sake of scientific objectivity, I hope you are not surrendering to that standard. The true scientist follows the evidence.

“Science-fictionising” (if I may borrow that coin) has inspired many real scientific and technological achievements, so I certainly encourage you not to break the habit! My concern is when writers and thinkers fail to respect the distinction between the science and the fiction. Also, my sources tell me the answer to that eagerly anticipated planetary biocalculation is 42.

I was merely curious of what others think. I don't really have many people around to discuss this topic with here, plus even the ones that I could talk with didn't seem to be interested at all.

I wouldn't say though that my explanation is "atheistic" because it in fact attempts to explain what God or gods are/were. It would be a naturalistic explanation for "gods" and various aspects of the so called "supernatural" within the realm of science.

The hypothetical computer system running parallel on the biosphere is actually testable by science. We could attack the problem with bioinformatics, and search the databases of sequenced DNA for highly conserved genes and then check what they actually do, and if any of that hints at emmission or detection of low frequency EM waves. We could test the aformentioned emissions of bacterial cultures and check for information content. We could set up antenna arrays in various places like inside soil, in swamps, in the ocean, and on the same frequencies as described in the paper look for patterns that seem to indicate some form of organisation or structure.

The smartest of us could in fact mathematically show wether such a computer can even be built. I don't even know if you could create "circuits" using moving switches that are only connected through the emission and detection of signals.

Getting funding for such a research, or getting other people to join such a project might actually be the hardest part.

The smartest of us could in fact mathematically show wether such a computer can even be built. I don't even know if you could create "circuits" using moving switches that are only connected through the emission and detection of signals.

Getting funding for such a research, or getting other people to join such a project might actually be the hardest part.

I suspect if your idea is true it would be hard to prove as a computer system that that has been around for as long as you have suggested would be running within a nano gnats whisker of the Shannon limit: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115 as to look like white noise as near as dammit to us unless we understood the underling code. And speaking personally I would not upload any version of my consciousness that i was planning to have around for a few billion years to an unencrypted version of windoze with its BSD problems I would look more towards a heavily encrypted triple parallel(ie 3 different versions) of Linux at the very least making it even harder to decrypt.

edited to add there are I think prototype photonic switches being worked on with some success tho I cant remember the links or lmgtfy code words that would enable wireless "circuits"

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

Not necessarily. While evolution is amazing. "Good enough" is often just fine. Remember for a organism to be a "winner" it only has to be just slightly better than its predators and peers at survival. For example you still have eyeballs that evolved for seeing underwater and are only just adapted enough to do an effective job on land. Being able to see into the IR or UV would be far more useful, but... you can't get there from fluid filled eyes no matter how long you let evolution play its genetic slot machine.

Likewise I doubt you can get any kind of computational functionality or higher gestalt logic out of whatever micro level electronic communication goes on. The physics and the developmental leap required, simply do not favor it, otherwise it would be obvious in its manifestation.

USJay wrote:

Robert O. Becker, M.D., postulated in “The Body Electric” that a primordial electronic analog sensory ability predates the present ionic (“digital”) nervous systems of virtually all multi-cellular animals. He went on to suggest that evolution never discarded the analog systems, but rather built the “digital” systems using the analog networks as the scaffolding.

Not a good analogy (analog or digital), more like the difference between broadcast signal and addressable coaxial cable. While both are communications means, they have different functionality and even scales. Discreet neurological signals are necessary for complex motive life, when you need to stimulate specific sequences of neurons to recall a memory or excite a specific muscle to run away from a lion. Where as a more broad electro-chemical (most likely more of the later) intercellular communications means is still important in regulating cell/tissue growth and organization and misc other "house-keeping" functions. Ie: the "nervous system" of plants.

Quote:

The anatomically precise bilateral symmetry of certain infectious diseases is evidence of this.

Err... that is because bodies tend to be bilaterally symmetrical and diseases have a predilection to favor those places they infect.

Quote:

... but the hypothesis that intercellular communication might have a non-ionic electromagnetic or electronic dimension essential to biological function is worthy of serious investigation.

It is, but not in trying to find some kind of higher functionality I'm afraid. It will be more about finding out how the intra and inter cellular machinery works.

All my references to Dr. Becker’s work serve only to support my closing thought (the one where we actually agree, James!), not box’s premise.

JamesG wrote:

USJay wrote:

The anatomically precise bilateral symmetry of certain infectious diseases is evidence of this.

Err... that is because bodies tend to be bilaterally symmetrical and diseases have a predilection to favor those places they infect.

This reference is specifically to diseases which infect otherwise indistinguishable tissues such as skin or fascia or striated muscle which are found throughout the body, not paired and physiologically distinct viscera such as kidneys or lungs. The unanswered question is why certain diseases have the “predilection” in the first place. There appear to be no biochemical markers which distinguish those generic tissues from apparently identical tissue found elsewhere, yet some infections will occur only in precisely mirrored locations on both sides of the body.

Robert Becker suggested that somatic electrical potentials, which can uniquely identify any two bilaterally symmetrical points on or in the body, might offer a simple solution to this still unexplained phenomenon.

USJay wrote:

I do not believe for a moment that life on Earth has been hijacked by alien programming or has evolved into some kind of Pandora-like world-mind, but the hypothesis that intercellular communication...

JamesG wrote:

USJay wrote:

... but the hypothesis that intercellular communication might have a non-ionic electromagnetic or electronic dimension essential to biological function is worthy of serious investigation.

It is, but not in trying to find some kind of higher functionality I'm afraid. It will be more about finding out how the intra and inter cellular machinery works.

This reference is specifically to diseases which infect otherwise indistinguishable tissues such as skin or fascia or striated muscle which are found throughout the body, not paired and physiologically distinct viscera such as kidneys or lungs. The unanswered question is why certain diseases have the “predilection” in the first place. There appear to be no biochemical markers which distinguish those generic tissues from apparently identical tissue found elsewhere, yet some infections will occur only in precisely mirrored locations on both sides of the body.

Because there is no such thing as "indistinguishable tissues" each region even within the same tissue is distinct and unique because pressures and stresses and blood or lymphatic flows are different etc. However those do tend to occur on opposite sides of the body because of symmetry.

Quote:

Robert Becker suggested that somatic electrical potentials, which can uniquely identify any two bilaterally symmetrical points on or in the body, might offer a simple solution to this still unexplained phenomenon.

That is hardly the simple solution.

USJay wrote:

Paraphrasing is the sincerest form of flattery.

It is not paraphrasing. You are implying much more into the concept than I.